Gamers, Bots, and Memes: Understanding Closed Networks and their Impact on the French Election

Storyful has built a team of journalists and technologists to analyse information – and misinformation – and how it makes its way across platforms and onto the news agenda. We’re looking at open and closed platforms; at the individuals and groups driving the dissemination of information, including how they are related to each other; and the effects of the information after publication. In this piece, Benjamin Decker, Cristina Abellan-Matamoros, and Ciarán O’Connor look at some of the ways information campaigns have spread from closed to open networks during the French presidential campaign.

After Donald Trump’s surprise win in November’s US presidential election, a wave of media analysis pulled back the curtain on a world of troll armies, false news sites and propagandists operating below the surface of what was reported on the campaign trail. A new vocabulary, such as “fake news,” bots, and the reappearance of Soviet-era dezinformatsiya, has since flared up, been appropriated and then re-appropriated by those involved.

Public trust in mainstream media fell in 2016 and consumers adopted a siloed approach to news, opening up opportunities for third parties who wished to spread misinformation during the campaign. With elections happening this weekend in France and later this year in Germany, all eyes look to Europe and the information networks furiously operating behind the scenes.

These misinformation campaigns can drive not only the content of stories but also how they are disseminated. For example, was the idea for a tweetstorm hatched on a private chat server? What was the first site to publish a knowingly false story, and where was that site registered? Who are the users boosting the profile of Facebook pages through likes and comments, and are they real?

For news outlets to cover the public elements of these campaigns – the tweets only, for instance – is to give an incomplete picture. The coordination and communication happening behind the scenes, as it were, is a major part of the story.

As the streams of nationalist propaganda spread across Europe in the early months of 2017, Storyful was looking at a number of platforms, open and closed. [Note: By closed networks, we are specifically talking about end-to-end encryption apps such as Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, and Discord, to name a few. The platforms vary in functionality and style, but they all enable users to share content and communicate anonymously in tightly controlled groups, as opposed to more open networks like Twitter.]

We’ve also been working with colleagues in the First Draft Partner Network on the CrossCheckproject, wherein a number of newsrooms are working together to verify trending stories and debunk false information relating to the French election.

Building on work already done in relation to closed networks, we have been analysing elements of the French presidential campaign, including interactions between these public and private platforms. We have identified a number of attempted smear campaigns against En Marche! presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron, and other campaigns designed to support Marine Le Pen, the far-right Front National candidate.

We have also begun to monitor the magnitude of effect of these messages. For instance, how widely shared were particular stories? How much engagement did they attract? What was the reach of tweets about a particular topic or issue?

The goals of such campaigns, as well as their main tactics on open social platforms that include Twitter and Facebook, have been documented; however, the origins of these campaigns often lie in more secretive and private areas of the Internet.

Discord

Discord, a messaging app used by gamers, has been identified as a base from which pro-Le Pen communication campaigns have been planned and launched. Earlier this year, for instance, Buzzfeed’s Ryan Broderick reported that Donald Trump supporters were using Discord to coordinate pro-Le Pen activity.

Two servers on Discord, The Great Liberation of France, and La Tavernes des Patriotes, have proved central to pro-Front National activity.

Many of the users in these servers are also active participants on political chatboards on 4chan, its French equivalent Jeauxvideo, and Reddit. A La Taverne des Patriotes Facebook page exists. However, tactical coordination behind social media smear campaigns originates on Discord, and this server is the focus of the group’s activity.

Each Discord server has its own set of channels, dealing with different activities related to the French election, including: meme creation, highlighting content to share, tweetstorm coordination, and how-to guides on setting up ghost Twitter accounts.

Broadly, the anti-Macron campaign on Discord targets four key themes: the candidate’s vague policy platform, his lack of engagement with working-class citizens, his claim that he is a political outsider, and a claim that his experience does not allow him to understand voters’ everyday concerns.

In order to carry out campaigns amplifying these themes and championing Le Pen and the Front National, Discord users coordinate various Tweetstorms.

For instance, on February 20, a tweetstorm was proposed by a user called @Neirdan, who maintains the same Discord and Twitter usernames, urging the group to follow tactics used in #OpSkynet, a controversial operation which came to light in the wake of the #Gamergate phenomenon. The “op” involves users following others who retweet a given hashtag, so building a network of support. Neirdan suggests using similar tactics in an effort to amplify content tagged with #OPatriosphere and, in turn, increase “the network of patriots.”

While @Neirdan only touts a following of 704 Twitter users, the user pushed out a meme which had been shared in Discord twice during the tweetstorm, garnering 32 retweets and 24 likes on the first tweet and 27 retweets and 26 likes on the second.

In addition to @Neirdan’s coordination of the tweetstorm and dissemination of specific memes, another member of the La Tavernes, Lucidus_DLNF, who goes by @Lucidus_France on Twitter, has over 6,000 followers, and often acts as both a coordinator of operations and a major influencer. With a far wider reach than @Neirdan, @Lucidus_France’s tweet, which was retweeted 96 times, reached a much wider audience, leading to a surge in the velocity of content tagged with #OPatriosphere.

Another example of a more prominent account reaching a wider base is Le Chevalier, associated with the Twitter account @ResistanceFRA, which boasts a following of 4,071. Using the same meme pushed out by @Neirdan, Le Chevalier asked fellow Discord users to amplify the tweet, which was in turn retweeted 199 times and liked 162 times. The hashtag was trending on Twitter in France for several hours, reaching the third highest trending hashtag on February 20.

It’s worth noting that two out of the three users were associated with differing account names on closed and open networks, thereby obscuring the link between their presences on those networks.

#LaSecuriteCestMarine

In another example, Discord users launched a campaign to get to get the hashtag #LaSecuriteCestMarine trending at 6pm, April 18. (The hashtag had been used previously, in an apparently uncoordinated way, to the same effect.) Fear-inducing photos were posted. Pro-Le Pen followers did not wait long to tweet out the success of their tweetstorm.

Soon after, the hashtag appeared on Twitter and Facebook, with users posting the same visuals as disseminated in Discord along with the hashtag, with many of the tweets posted in English as well as French. A number of users tweeting the hashtag specifically mentioned the 6pm launch time, and asked others to retweet.

Operation Baguette – Discord, 4Chan, and Twitter

On April 12, Discord user Lou Gascoun discussed an ongoing 4Chan thread about a social media campaign dubbed “Operation Baguette.”

The thread in question was started by a 4Chan user described as being based in the UK, which piggybacked off of an earlier thread started by a user described as being based in France, calling for the mass dissemination of a music video by made by French hip-hop artist DabraBéné for the song Crapulerie, which shows a number of youths brandishing weapons. The user who started the former thread called for the video to be shared on Twitter along with the hashtags #ToutAfrique and #Minikeums, as well the word “Vélib,” saying “If French people see this video, they’ll want to vote for Le Pen.”

In the latter thread, the original poster claimed that, “If this video goes viral before the first round, there is no way in hell Le Pen won’t win by a landslide.” The post itself led to over 220 comments, many racist, by users from a number of countries.

At the time of writing, the video had been viewed a total of 7,535 times since the launch of Operation Baguette, and received an additional 656 thumbs down reactions on YouTube.

Analysis of the reach of several hashtags proposed as part of Operation Baguette for the period is useful in determining the campaign’s efficacy.

The use of the #ToutAfrique hashtag was problematic for the campaign: the hashtag is also widely used by journalists and development connected to connected to the French Agency for Development, AFD.

Two far-right social media accounts, @NationalismYes (1,335 followers) and @WanAwoo0 (4,648 followers), managed to push through a total of 6 tweets with the video, leading to a total of 12.8k impressions on Twitter. While these numbers may seem meager, particularly given that @AFD_France and @ID4D racked up over 236k impressions as the top two hashtag influencers, both far-right accounts managed to place in the top 15 influencers during the specified dates.

#ToutAfrique

With #Minikeums, Operation Baguette did not fare much better.,Conversation relating to the hashtag was driven mainly by a French entertainment aggregator, @allocine. Comparing the nearly 300k impressions that account received versus the 12.8k impressions that @NationalismYes (1,335 followers) and @WanAwoo0 (4,648 followers) garnered together similarly suggests a general failure to impact conversations surrounding the hashtag.

#Minikeums

Despite the failure to have an impact on broader subject-aligned hashtags such as #ToutAfrique and #Minikeums, hashtags geared specifically towards the far-right audience, such as #LaGaucheNeSeraPasAuSecondTour and #MFGA, have enabled far-right influencers to dominate conversations amongst themselves on Twitter and push those ideas into the forefront of the French Twittersphere.

#LaGaucheNeSeraPasAuSecondTour

#MFGA

Although Operation Baguette may have failed to have a significant impact on wider political discourse in France, it was another instance of a coordinated, cross-platform campaign, comprising public and private elements.

What’s Next

As part of our research in this area, Storyful is also examining the role bot networks play in dissemination of propaganda and misinformation. Separately, Facebook has announced measures to counter fake profiles, likes, and comments. There’s a common thread running through these elements and the coordinated campaigns outlined above: In all of them, the public manifestations of communication do not tell the full story of the intent and the coordinated efforts behind those communications.

Mapping and monitoring these types of communications is something Storyful will continue to do – in the French election and beyond. It is only by quickly identifying how, when and why these networks are created can we in the media help quell misinformation before it spreads too widely.